


Endlings

by Represent



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 12:22:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5626519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Represent/pseuds/Represent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A lab accident at FentonWorks unleashes a contagion. Trapped in quarantine, the citizens of Amity Park are forced to take matters into their own hands to defend their city, and their lives, from creatures called Endlings. How long will they survive in a town with zero rules? And what's happening beyond the city gates?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Endlings

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote pieces of this last year for NaNoWriMo. This story was originally going to be titled "The Dome" but apparently there's a TV series and a book called that I didn't know about at the time. After I found out about the show I got pretty disheartened and wasn't even going to post this, but now, a year later, I figured what the hell. I've never actually watched the show so hopefully this story is pretty different? After all, everyone needs to write at least one zombie-alien uprising story if they're in the Phandom.

Amity Park, Ohio, USA

—?—

Above in a vomit-inducing pink-tinged sky the full moon cast the only light upon Amity Park. The street was empty of humans. It calculated for a moment, finding itself neither pleased nor dismayed by this fact. Emotions were new to it. They were something it did not ask for, but had inherited from it's host species. It tried to do them as sparingly as possible.

Five more of it's kind were moving, slowly, up and down across the pavement. Their human hosts were in various stages of decay. It felt something. _Annoyance?_ Didn't they know humans needed food? _It's_ host would not die to neglect.

Besides emotions, humans were capable of many fascinating things such as taste, touch, and sight. Even the world in which they lived held many novelties. It looked up at the orb in the sky. That, for instance. Or— it looked down at where it's form ended, wiggling its many tiny appendages against this rough texture, marveling at the nerve endings. Humans were sensitive, delicate, creatures.

Trickling out a probe, it quickly determined that it was of a lesser Nth than anything else on this street. In fact, it had never come across an Endling more powerful. The Endlings sent out their own probes, identified it, and moved away. It felt their minds, connected as always, like tiny bits of invisible string. If it wanted to, it could control them all. But, finding no logical reason to do so, it floated down an alleyway instead.

As always, its primary mission was to find food for it's host. Afterwards it would wander this strange world and uncover as many secrets as it could before dawn.

It was while it was rummaging in one of the human's big metal bins for anything potentially edible when it felt another Endling drift down the alleyway. It turned it's head slightly to look, seeing an emaciated red-haired female human. It probed. It was more powerful. Uninterested, it turned back to it's task. As it reached a hand back into the bin it felt something shift from deep within. A tremor; an earthquake.

Emotions slammed into it, more than it had ever felt before.

Sadness— pain— confusion— _horror—_

They flooded so quickly that it could barely identify where one began and the other ended. Until now, it had never felt more than one of them at once. It hadn't even know humans could feel more than one at a time, much less _four_ , five, even ten.

Crippled, it stumbled and hit the back alley wall, not noticing until too late that this was all it's host's fault. It's human was re-awakening, against all odds, and fighting its hold.

—Anger— resentment— fury— _rebellion._

It didn't want this. Control over this human wasn't worth this kind of torture. As it retreated somewhere into the back of the human mind it could hear it's demonic chanting.

_Sister, sister sister, sister…_

* * *

Amity Park, Ohio, USA

—Valerie—

People always said there was anger in her. Running like whiskey through her veins, bubbling, fiery, real. Anger was what kept her going. She didn't have anger issues, she had a purpose. A directive. There was a difference. Valerie liked to describe herself as passionate. It was a nicer word than angry. And words mattered. They mattered a lot. Words were what distinguished her from the things that had overtaken this town.

It was exactly three months and fifteen days Post Rapture. The early April wind would have been chilly, if not for the existence of the Dome. It glistened above their heads as a reminder of their imprisonment, letting the sun filter through its pink hue, keeping the air stagnant and hot. It made everything in this city sunburned. It'd been two months since the Dome had been activated, isolating Amity Park from the outside world. Quarantine. Although, they had used a more polite word. Words, after all, mattered. But in the end the government wanted to keep whatever was in here, in here, and whatever was out there, out there.

In the meantime, all they could do was wait until a cure was found.

Valerie wasn't very good at waiting. Every day a war was being fought for Amity Park. Humans ruled the day, while the creatures called Endlings ruled the night. It was a shaky truce. If Valerie had her way they wouldn't have to hide underground during the night. If there was one subject she was most passionate about, it was Endlings.

"They should be here by now." A voice jolted her out of her thoughts. She looked over at her father, who was squinting up at the sun. Soon enough it would be hidden. People were rushing about the street, heads down, masks on, trying to get all their supplies and head home before nightfall.

"They'll be fine. There's still an hour until curfew."

Her father straightened his belt upon his hips. He had refused to stop wearing his security uniform, despite the fact that he was only one of maybe ten men left still attempting to do his job. Normality was all they had, anymore, he had told her. Rules and regulations were the best thing for this town, lest it fall into anarchy.

"I hope you're right," he told her, ducking his head in a nod of acknowledgement to passersby.

Valerie forced herself to be unconcerned. Her team knew what they were doing. She had trained them all herself. They were armed. She was sure they'd show up any minute now with the goods and they'd do their customary dusk patrol before heading back for the night.

She picked up a small rock from the ground and started to chip away at the brick wall behind her. Already, people had written on most of the walls of the city with messages, the names of the infected, lost love ones, and Doctrine verses. Endlings couldn't read, just like they couldn't speak. Right now this wall proclaimed, in big white messy letters: Believe in Him. Underneath in scrawled Sharpie someone had written: RIP Delainey Lee, Turner Avery, Tiffany Snow, Erin Snow, and James Snow. Underneath that running obituary someone had scratched: Rest In HELL FENTONS. The last name was underlined viciously over and over again.

Valerie chose a spot a little to the left of that last message to write her own. Her message said: TAKE BACK THE NIGHT, AXION, COME FIGHT. After all, any successful resistance movement needed some recruiting.

* * *

North Mercy Hospital, Amity Park, Ohio, USA

—Tucker—

"You know, I really hate hospitals."

"No way." A hushed whisper cut at him. "You've only told me, like, fifty times."

"You're supposed to avoid hospitals in zombie apocalypse movies," Tucker pointed out. "That's zombie-survival 101."

"I never watched zombie movies," she said, clipped. Tucker knew she wanted him to be quiet, but he couldn't help it. He talked when he was nervous. And he was nervous about this place. He checked his gun's bullets for the tenth time. They were still there.

He looked over his shoulder at her. "No zombie movies? Man, you were sheltered as a child."

Tucker knew she was wrinkling her nose at him in disdain, because her white hospital mask crinkled and bobbed over her face. She grabbed an errant strand of platinum blonde hair, pinning it up into her messy ponytail. Despite the sword at her hip and the dirt smeared across her forehead, she had a twinkling innocence about her. She was quick to smile, quick to pretend this wasn't effecting her. All of her years of cheerleading had prepared her for this. She used her air-headed bubbliness as a shield against the fact that, here, at the end of the world, she was having to deal with Tucker Foley.

"Shut up," Star whispered.

Don't wake them.

Tucker obeyed as they patrolled down the deserted hallway. He looked inside each door through tiny rectangular windows, hoping to find something they could grab and resell. Bandages, blankets… this place was a treasure trove. The hospital had been the first to succumb to the invasion. When it had started the first possessed had been brought here to the psyche ward. After all, the alpha stage of infection is marked with demonic mutterings, mood swings, and almost catatonic-like fits. No one had dared come near it since. And for good reason, Tucker thought glumly to himself. Who knew how many of them were still in here.

"Foley."

He turned away, seeing Star jiggling a handle of a door experimentally. With three strides, he crossed the hallway and glanced inside, seeing a room full of medical supplies.

"Jackpot," he whispered, reaching down for his pick. Star turned away from the door, unsheathing her sword as she kept a trained eye out, standing protectively to Tucker's exposed back as he worked the lock. His tool kept slipping in his gloves. With an annoyed grunt he tugged the glove off.

"You shouldn't–" Star began to reprimand him.

"Do you want this lock picked or not?"

She fell silent. The lock gave way. The handle clicked open and the door swung out as Tucker put his glove back on. Together, they crossed the door jam and took in the rows of scattered gauze, bandages, and needles.

Star skipped, bouncing on the balls of her tennis shoes, over to the cupboards. Abandoning her sword and her caution on the countertop, she rummaged through different prescription pills. She fished around in her back jeans pocket for a crumpled bit of paper and held it up to see if any of the labels matched.

Tucker moved to follow, trying not to be distracted by her crop top and low-waisted jeans, before he noticed how the drapes blocked the sunlight in this room. That uneasy feeling in his gut tripled. It was barely noticeable, but this room was maybe one or two degrees cooler than the hallway had been. He spun slowly and saw a form curled up in the corner underneath a hospital blanket. It was the hunched shape that gave it away.

"Yes!" Star tossed a laugh over her tanned and exposed shoulder. "Painkillers! The good stuff, too. And anti-inflami-whatevers." She grabbed them and, without looking, threw them behind her for Tucker to catch, but they hit the floor and rattled across the room, bouncing several times. Tucker swore each bounce was louder than the last. The sound of it echoed over and over. Tucker felt his breath catch in his throat as he watched that hunched form shift.

With a murderous look on her face, Star whipped around. "What are you—" Then she noticed the pair of glinting red eyes that were sleepily blinking up at them from across the way. A blanket fell, a head poked out, and a jaundiced face was half-illuminated in the low light. It stared blankly at them. Those eyes slowly calculated what had awoken it, and what to do now that it had awakened.

Star was stuck in the same dilemma. "What do we do?" she hissed. She grabbed her sword from the counter and raised it, putting it between herself and the Endling.

"Kill it before it warns the rest of them." Tucker snapped, raising his own weapon to take aim, but it was too late. The two of them could feel the vibrations thick in the air, like someone plucking invisible strings. The warning had already been projected. Soon every one of these things would be awake and aware of them. They were like termites, able to send messages through the air. And, as long as they were within this Endling's line of vision, they would all be able to see exactly where they were and what they were doing.

He turned to Star, seeing her looking to him for direction. "This is the part where we run." Tucker told her, shoving the pills into his bag as the form of a malnourished girl shakily stood up from the corner. Star said nothing, shoveling as much as she could into her own bag before following Tucker out the door and down the hallway. As they ran emotionless faces started to appear in the rectangular windows of each door, watching, with blood-filled eyes, as they barreled past.

Tucker was so busy looking over his shoulder that all he saw was a pair of huge red lips and mass of curly hair before he was tumbling, entangled in another human being, onto the now freezing tile floor.

"OW!" those lips screeched. "Get off of me, loser!"

"Sorry, sorry–" he panted, hardly able to form words, too dissolved in his own panic. He managed to elbow her in the face a few more times before getting onto his feet. A disheveled Paulina Jimenez-Sanchez was glaring at him as she got up. Tucker was unaffected. For the past three months he had been constantly at the receiving end of hundreds of womanly glares.

"Who woke them?" Paulina demanded.

Star pointed at him.

"I'm gunna kill you when we get out of here, Foley."

"Yes, ma'am."

An arrow whizzed past his ear and he was stunned, thinking Paulina had, for once, actually followed through with one of her death threats, until there was the wet thud of one of those things hitting the ground behind him. Tucker watched as over a dozen of them phased through the doors and lined up in perfect gridded rows, advancing upon the trio with alarming speed.

"Take that, you disgusting freaks!" Paulina spat, her usual perfect hair tousled about her head, making her look wild. Star grabbed Paulina's arm before she could reload her pink crossbow again, pulling her towards the exit.

"There's too many of them. Let's go!" Star ordered as the three of them huddled in some semblance of military formation.

This was one order with which Tucker wholeheartedly agreed. And his legs wholeheartedly ran as his body wholeheartedly moved to get as far away from this hospital, and all the things contained within it, as fast as as humanly possible.

* * *

Manson Residence, South Bend, Indiana, USA

—Sam—

Samantha Manson was inspecting herself in her mirror, taking an inventory of her own body. She hadn't changed much since yesterday. All of her body parts were still there: Two spindly arms and two equally spindly legs, huge almond-shaped lilac eyes, dark shoulder-length hair that was impeccably cut, a pale expanse of forehead and too-round cheeks, dotted by a petite red nose. Her frame was boyish, boobs nonexistent. She was small, but wiry. She flexed. All of her pushups had granted her a soft curve of muscle.

With a grim frown Sam turned away from the mirror and sat down at her desk, pulling her knees up into her chest as she surveyed her cage. Dark drapes covered the windows of an otherwise predominantly black bedroom. Without a hint of sunlight, Sam felt as if she was living in one gigantic shadow. Besides the mirror her room contained a overly lavish queen bed with a deep purple comforter and enough pillows to throw an epic pillow fight. Dust gathered along an impressive stereo setup that had been sitting, untouched, on her dresser for months. Old and new thriller and sci-fi movie posters lined her closet door. One of them had fallen to the floor and Sam hadn't yet found the energy to fix it. For the last four months this place had sucked the life out of her as she sat, stuck, inside her parent's absurdly large mansion in South Bend Indiana, being good, staying quiet, being thankful, and above all not asking any questions.

Sam always told herself that she'd be prepared if an apocalypse ever came. She had read up on how to survive. She knew how to start a fire with two sticks and how to fashion a tourniquet from almost nothing. Of course, not much can prepare you for the real thing. Sam wasn't even convinced this was the real thing. She had thought the apocalypse would be a lot less… boring.

Sam tapped her pencil, pausing for a long moment over her black stained desk. Her mother had given her this journal to write her thoughts in. To vent, or something. Sam felt very much like Anne Frank, stuck in hiding, forced to surrender all of her liberty in hopes of going undetected. Heck, they were both Jewish. Only she wasn't good at writing, and even if she was she had nothing interesting to write about.

Today is the same as yesterday. She wrote this at the top of the page with today's date: April 6, 2016. She flipped back through her journal, seeing the same sentence flick by. It was depressing, really, how all she ever wrote about was what she ate. March 21: Canned corn, pickled carrots, rice chips. March 13: Dried dates, canned peas, rice chips. February 25: Canned peaches, rice chips. Sam remembered those peaches. That had been a great day. Her mouth salivated at the thought of them. She wondered if she could convince her mother to let her have some peaches for dinner. Then she realized just how ridiculous this train of thought was in the grand scheme of things. How she was sitting here worrying over canned peaches versus canned spinach, counting the freckles on her body, living in a lavish mansion full of safety and books and her film collection while people were outside dying.

How pathetic. She tossed that useless journal across the desk, wanting nothing more than to rip it to shreds. Nothing she could write in there would be of any use. She knew little of what was happening outside the confines of her bedroom. Her parents had volunteered as part of the relief effort for the first month, before they came back converted, preaching Master's Doctrines, and retreated to their underground bunker to wait out the storm. And then, if they prayed enough, they'd ascend. After their return any questioning of the Doctrine, any prying into what was happening, and any requests to go outside upset them. Almost anything she did seemed to upset them.

Sam let out a slow sigh. Much of her frustration bled out of her, leaving her feeling childish and remorseful. She picked up the journal delicately. As she unbent some of the pages her eyes trailed to the newspaper lying near her lamp. She had read it a million times, memorized it even, but she found herself unfolding it and reading it again.

NATIONAL GUARD QUARANTINES AMITY PARK read in heavy black type across the front page. There was a half-page color image of a massive pink Dome rising up into the atmosphere, along with seven tanks and over fifty armed soldiers. Underneath the caption read: The National Guard locks down the borders of Amity Park after outbreak worsens.

AMITY PARK— No one is allowed out of Amity Park after the number of confirmed deaths reaches 34, and the number of suspected cases hits 62. With no cure in sight, The National Guard has activated a 50-mile tall shield that cuts off access out of the town. The current epidemic follows a lab accident at FentonWorks in December, resulting in the deaths of...

"Sammy-kins? Come downstairs and pray with us."

Sam stuffed the newspaper underneath her journal and spun in her chair to see her mother at her bedroom door. Her usually over exuberant mother looked as if she was eroding away, turning into dust from all the stress and awful food. Her eyes were perpetually wide as if they had seen horrible things, things they could never un-see.

Even though Sam had been living underneath a rock, she knew that the quarantine had failed. She had surmised that much by how her parents were acting. Whatever had started at FentonWorks had spread god-knows how far. Maybe even across the country. Maybe even across the world.

Sam got up and followed her mother down into the basement. She took up her seat dutifully next to them. She recited the Doctrine, although her heart wasn't in it. She took her canned spinach and she didn't ask for peaches.


End file.
